Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer at the centre of the 2024 Olympics gender controversy furore, secured her ticket to the 66kg semi-finals after beating Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori on Saturday.
It follows her Thursday victory over Italy’s Angela Carini.
The win, made possible in just 46 seconds, brought to the fore a gender eligibility row targeting Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, both reportedly intersex athletes who had been disqualified from the International Boxing Association’s (IBA) world championships last year over allegations they had failed an eligibility test for women’s competition.
Following Khelif’s win over Karini this week, the International Olympic Committee and Paris 2024 issued a joint statement addressing the criticism and hate speech Khelif and Lin have received on social media.
The statement accuses the IBA’s former secretary general and CEO, George Yerolimpos, of making a “sudden and arbitrary” decision to disqualify the two boxers from the last world championships.
“The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years,” the statement read.
“These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA. Towards the end of the IBA World Championships in 2023, they were suddenly disqualified without any due process.
“Eligibility rules should not be changed during ongoing competition, and any rule change must follow appropriate processes and should be based on scientific evidence.”
“Let’s be very clear, we are talking about women’s boxing,” International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach Bach said in a press conference on Saturday.
“We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who have been raised as a woman, who have a passport as a woman and who have competed for many years as a woman.
“This is the clear definition of a woman. There was never any doubt about them being a woman.”
Khelif’s disqualification from the embattled former governing body of the sport came three days after she had won a match against Russian Azalia Amineva.
The timing of the decision, making the previously unbeaten Russian athlete holder regain her official record, raised doubts by critics of the IBA, where Umar Kremlev of Russia sits as president.
The IBA was permanently stripped of its Olympic credentials in 2019 and ran the past two Olympic boxing tournaments with a task force.
The former governing body has a history of troubled governance and longstanding accusations of corruption and lack of transparency in its dealings.
In 2004, Yerolimpos was fired by the Athens Olympics organisers from his then advisor role, after a Greek newspaper reported that he proposed to help a US company win an Olympics security contract that would get him and his German partner a 10-percent stake.
